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by kuhewa
1097 days ago
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Underpins is the correct word. There is no comparison of observations of any behaviour to a theory or hypothesis about any behaviour outside of an epistemological framework that makes certain assumptions, even if it is unwittingly. Neither those assumptions nor the framework itself can be derived from science itself. > Is a philosophy of science similar? Or does it have a practical effect on scientific work? Absolutely, what a p value is depends on your philosophy of science. Whether your statistical analysis even involves p values also depends on it. > Also, perhaps different scientists might learn different philosophies without practical effect. Yes, if you stumble upon some simple causal relationship of such massive effect size it is undeniably present beyond a reasonable doubt, it may not matter if a Bayesian or frequentist practitioner came across it. However it certainly can matter what framework evidence gets analysed, considered and aggregated when the observable data themselves are essentially the same. |
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Okay, let's assume animals (such as scientists) observe things, record them, and react to them without an explicit theory in mind, but there's an implicit epistemological framework that describes how they behave.
It seems like you still need to build your epistemology to match the animals' behaviors, or it's not the one they use? When scientists do math, you need to observe how they actually use math. How do they actually set up and run an experiment or write a paper? It might be different than you imagine?
This is what David Chapman calls the "ethnomethodological flip" [1].
Scientists also might use math differently from how they claim they use it in a formal paper, which doesn't include all the blind alleys and mistakes. A scientific paper is a cleaned-up just-so story.
A fun example of ethnomethodology is studying exactly how a scientist follows the formal procedure for doing a PCR test, including small mistakes that they don't explain and you might not even notice in the demonstration video unless you watch it very carefully, multiple times. [2]
It seems like a very cool thing to do that's rarely done. It might help for coming up with better philosophy?
[1] https://metarationality.com/ethnomethodological-flip [2] https://metarationality.com/rational-pcr